Beldina Odenyo was on the verge of stardom when she took her own life in 2021. In this beautiful documentary, her grief-stricken sister Leah attempts to finish her album – and her journey will make you cry again and again
In 2021, the Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo was on the brink of major stardom. That October, aged 31, she headlined a gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, delivering an instantly legendary performance; barefoot, cloaked and bone-shaking in its intensity. Everyone in that concert hall knew they were witnessing something extraordinary that night. Two weeks later, Odenyo took her own life.
This tender and grief-stricken documentary, which opens a year after her death, is directed with remarkable care by Louise Lockwood. What emerges is a sensitively drawn portrait of a visionary artist haunted by trauma, formed through her teenage video diaries, the words of those who loved her, the handful of exquisite songs she left behind – kept in a folder on her hard drive named “passable demos” – and the determination of her older sister, Leah McAleer, to keep her astonishing voice alive. A deeply painful venture that she understands is itself a product of her insurmountable grief.
Justice department detained James Codey Bryant and allege he offered ‘technical advice’ to primary suspect
A surprise suspected accomplice has been arrested in connection with a mass school shooting in Canada that was made notorious after an 18-year-old allegedly killed six children after discussing it with the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
The US Department of Justice said Tuesday it had detained James Codey Bryant, 30, a resident of western Washington state, on a charge of conspiracy to murder persons in a foreign country.
I could populate the entirety of this pre-match coverage with milestones and statistics from Messi’s illustrious career – his international career alone is a statistician’s dream, especially in the past two World Cup cycles, which saw him solidify his status as an immortal.
Our own Ryan Benson unpacks the statistical absurdity of it all, arguing that Messi has at this point “completed football.” It’s hard to disagree:
Her glacial poise in North By Northwest made her a cinematic icon, but films including On the Waterfront and Loving revealed great subtlety alongside the glamour
‘I’m Eve Kendall. I’m 26 and unmarried. Now you know everything.”
Not quite everything. That is the famously succinct introduction given in a swaying dining car in a voice creamy with insinuation. Eve is speaking to Cary Grant’s fugitive ad man Roger Thornhill, wrongly accused of murder and hiding out from the cops on a train from New York to Chicago in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North By Northwest. Eve is going to hide him in her compartment because she wants to have sex with him, and much later that train of theirs is to symbolically enter a tunnel. But is that the whole story? Eve’s amazingly beautiful, enigmatic face encodes a secret.
The actor, who has died at the age of 102, was best known for her Oscar-winning performance in On The Waterfront as well as for starring in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. Her career spanned eight decades – here we look back at her life and work
Eva Marie Saint, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s golden age of the 1940s and 50s, has died aged 102. Her screen work spanned six decades: Saint made her screen debut opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated thriller North by Northwest, and in one of her last screen appearances played Superman’s adoptive mother Martha Kent in the 2006 superhero film Superman Returns.
A family spokesman said on Tuesday that Saint had died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.
The prisoner received two doses of pentobarbital last Wednesday as authorities tried to put her to death
Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said on Tuesday.
Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Poor old "Chinook" seems to have been blown up by the elements onto the beach on the Brisbane River at Colmslie. This shot taken below the Colmslie Park looks downstream under the Gateway (or dual Sir Leo Hielscher) bridges that carry 12 lanes north/south as part of the Bruce/Pacific/Hume highways that connect Cairns in North Queensland with Melbourne, Victoria.
In playful, anthropomorphized sculptures, Hannah Lim takes inspiration from historical ceramics, classical Chinese literature, and her British-Singaporean heritage. For several years, the London-based artist has been interested in the 17th- and 18th-century design phenomenon known as Chinoiserie, in which European producers mimicked Chinese and other Asian motifs, appropriating a variety of regional aesthetics that catered to a Western market. “In my own work, I attempt to reclaim and re-imagine this practice in a more conscientious way,” Lim says in a statement. “My sculptures often draw inspiration from specific cultural styles or processes.”
Snuff bottles represent a consumer trend that emerged in China in the 17th century. Its namesake substance, which originated in the Americas, is a kind of powdered, scented tobacco that’s scooped with a tiny spoon and inhaled directly into the nose. As in Europe, its popularity spread especially among the affluent. When Lim observed several examples in museum collections around the U.K., she was fascinated by their ornate designs and variation and began experimenting with sculpting similar motifs. Then, she began to scale up.
“Phoenix Spirit House Snuff Bottle”
A typical snuff bottle is diminutive and jewel-like, typically just a couple of inches in diameter so that it could be both portable and easily tucked away. Lim’s are several inches tall and usually need to be held with both hands. “Initially, my own snuff bottle works were designed in a way to highlight certain personal aspects of my heritage. Over time, they’ve come to reflect different points in my research,” Lim tells Colossal. “Each of my own snuff bottles also has a hanging charm hidden within its lid. The hanging charm references the tiny spoon attached to the lid of traditional snuff bottles.”
For the structure, Lim uses a combination of polymer clay and Jesmonite, a casting material made by blending a mineral powder with liquid acrylic polymer. She also applies chalk, acrylic paint, and a layer of gloss to give each piece its finishing touches, including small painted or relief portraits of animals and imaginary creatures.
Inspiration comes from a wide range of mythological writings, particularly an ancient Chinese tome called The Classic of Mountains and Seas, which is a mostly fantastical account of more than 550 mountains and 300 waterways. “I’ve been attempting to interpret the text through my work, using the enchanting alchemic descriptions of these creatures as inspiration for my most recent series of sculptures and paintings,” the artist says.
“Sleeping Tiger Snuff Bottle”
Lim is continuing to experiment with scale and materials, especially through the use of metal, and recent sculptures like “Orchid Table” incorporate laser-cut elements. She’s also frequently making bespoke frames that serve as extensions of her paintings, and she plans to incorporate motifs onto the frames themselves.
If you’re in the U.K., see Lim’s solo exhibition Reimaginings through November 14 at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath. She’ll also have some works on view later this month with Cynthia Corbett Gallery in Paris, and later this year, she’ll unveil a new public artwork in Paddington, London. See more and follow updates on the artist’s Instagram.
“Orchid Table”“Midnight Crane Snuff Bottle 1”“Peach and Cranes”“Double Fish Snuff Bottle”“Bats and Peaches Snuff Bottle”“Watchful Crane”“Fenghuang Snuff Bottle”
IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries. Phoronix reports: They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review and remediation.
From today's announcement: "The milestone addresses a growing business risk. As autonomous AI agents become capable of combining several lower-risk software weaknesses into a more serious attack, companies need to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They need a practical way to develop, test and deploy fixes in the software that supports critical applications."
A brilliant and vibrant botanical portrait of a coral-red Cactus Dahlia captured in full summer bloom. Shot at 256mm with f/5.6, the close-up showcases the dense, starburst arrangement of its slender, pointed petals. The warm sunlight brings out the fiery red and salmon tones, perfectly isolated against a creamy, out-of-focus green background.
I took this photo of “Japanese Water Iris and Garden” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to Amami no Sato in Kagoshima, Japan. I love the spring-fed, mirror-like waters reflecting the surrounding greenery and sky, the bright purple Japanese water irises, the meticulously trimmed green bushes, the natural boulders, and the traditional stone elements arranged in a classic Zen layout…
I took this photo of a “Victorian-style glass gazebo and bougainvillea plants” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during my visit to Amami no Sato in Kagoshima, Japan. I love the Victorian glasshouse, or garden gazebo, and the vibrant magenta and pink potted bougainvillea plants…
NASHVILLE (ANP) - De ter dood veroordeelde Christa Pike is bij bewustzijn en aanspreekbaar nadat haar executie vorige week was mislukt. Dat laten haar advocaten weten aan ABC News. Pike zou op 30 september met injecties worden geëxecuteerd in de Amerikaanse staat Tennessee, maar dat ging mis. Sindsdien was ze buiten bewustzijn en lag ze aan een beademingsmachine.
The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading US AI model makers, is no contest when it comes to assessing which one gives you more value for your subscription money, according to industry research firm SemiAnalysis. Following changes to OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan that effectively halved its value, SemiAnalysis looked at the various subscription plans offered by AI companies, because that's still the main way that individuals and small businesses buy AI services. AI subscriptions are heavily subsidized – customers get far more tokens for their money than they would paying metered API rates. And SemiAnalysis argues that it's necessary to delve into subscription pricing to evaluate AI shops financially because subscription usage consumes a disproportionate amount of company compute resources. Claude subscriptions, the biz claims, take up about 42 percent of Anthropic's inference compute while generating just 10 percent of its revenue. And those subscriptions provide considerable value. "Anthropic is an overwhelmingly better deal, offering ~5x the API-equivalent value across the board," SemiAnalysis claims in reference to mid-tier models GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5. "You could argue that this is unfair for [OpenAI] because 6.1 Sol is much cheaper per token than Opus 5.5, but the gap is still massive even if you switch to comparing the number of tokens." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SemiAnalysis' calculation relies on measuring token output rates, converting those into tokens per 5-hour usage window and per month, and then computing the API-equivalent value. Company researchers contend that API-equivalent value is the best figure for capturing the value of a subscription plan, though they allow that other measures like raw token volume may be more appropriate in some instances. API-based comparisons can be slow to account for the rapidly shifting capabilities of models that come to market. The debut of a new open source model, for example, can alter what's possible at a given price. For those with access to subscription plans, the subsidized prices clearly offer real value, so much so that there's an underground market for reselling tokens from pooled subscription accounts in many parts of the world. But there are other ways to measure AI value. Artificial Analysis, for example, tracks cost per task – the estimated dollar cost of completing a specific task. By that yardstick, GPT-6.1 Sol ($0.72) is far more affordable than Claude Opus 5.5 ($5.98), at least for those paying API rates. But that ratio may not be true for different tasks – benchmark performance may not reflect your workload. As measured by tokens, Claude Pro ($20 per month) provides 2.9 billion tokens per month, compared to ChatGPT ($20/mo) at 1 billion tokens per month, according to SemiAnalysis. But models may use more or fewer tokens than others for the same task, and when the output is functional, like code, AI output may achieve a similar result across different models but with differing degrees of efficiency. Anticipating AI costs gets more complicated for businesses, which can't count on subscription subsidies and may not have experience with AI cost management. In a July report, McKinsey said 93 percent of enterprises exceeded their AI budgets. "I think all businesses are seeing their AI costs rise," said Dhruv Amin, co-founder of AI agent biz Anything, in an interview with The Register. Since the beginning of the year, he said, AI has been getting better at solving certain business problems, and companies have started deploying AI more widely, then noticing their token bills going through the roof. "The labs typically subsidize their prosumer plans with subscription pricing massively," said Amin. "And I think it's part of their marketing funnel because more people are able to use the tools, get familiar with the tools, and then bring those tools to work." But for larger companies, he said, two problems arise. You have more employees than can fit on a subsidized plan and, at scale, costs add up fast. "A huge way that enterprises solve this is being able to make a workload work well on the frontier and then quickly switch it to an open source model that they control and that they can serve at a much lower fraction of the cost," he said. "And so for us internally we were able to drop our AI costs 75 percent plus just by moving them all to Skydive Glide, which is our model router that for the given workload tries to find an equivalent open source model that can handle that workload without a quality drop. And so today we run a lot of our workloads on GLM-5.3 Flash." Amin said that companies adept at AI cost management maintain evaluation benchmarks that reflect their workloads. Companies use those metrics to test new models as they come out in whatever AI harness they're using, to ensure consistency. Looking ahead, he said, he expects companies will trust more of that work to service providers. "So what this means is that if you deploy an agent on top of us, we capture in the background the data of how that agent's actually running in production," he said. "And then we use that to construct the eval data set on the fly." ®
